Monday, March 14, 2011

OK. Something to take your mind off the Japanese earthquake. Here is an article I wrote and submitted to Suicide Girls the day before the earthquake struck. After the disaster in Japan I decided not to change this because I figured by Monday we'd all need something a bit lighter to read.

It's actually about two pretty interesting studies regarding pornography. One implies that the legalization and wider distribution of porn in the Czech Republic actually seems to have had some influence in reducing the number of real sex crimes. The other report says that staring at breasts can make you healthier. And that's why I do it, folks!

Finally, here is a cartoon that appeared in a Malaysian newspaper on Monday prompting a lot of people to get very upset. The newspaper issued an apology. That's our old pal Ultraman running away from the tsunami. Ultraman is a well-known symbol of Japan all over Asia.

The artist got it wrong though. The character is clearly supposed to be the original Ultraman. But he is depicted with gloves. It was Ultraman Jack who wore gloves! Although some of the live stage show versions of original Ultraman in the 1980s wore gloves. For 15 years I had to be the source of this kind of information.

You may foolishly try to ignore karma, but this will never work, and if you fight it too much, you will invite destruction that is worse than war. We are actually creating war through our everyday activities. You talk about peace in some angry mood, when actually you are creating war with that angry mood.

I found one of your books (Hardcore Zen) only a few weeks ago, and I thought I'd look you up to see if you're OK. Glad to see that you are!

Really appreciate your take on things--I don't know any practicing Buddhists, students or teacher or whatever who also has a foot in the punk world or even close. It's really helping my perspective as a casual sort of practitioner (not ever a hardcore punk here but close enough).

I'm glad that your ex-wife's family is well. Reading your post makes me feel better about how mine is doing

I haven't been able to reach my grandmother in Kashimadai.

Do you have any more information on the town? And how were you able to reach your family? I don't know how to find my grandmother because the phone lines aren't working and she doesn't know how to email ..

"This is certainly a time for the Buddhist lesson of not letting our fears and thoughts of "maybes" and "what ifs" run away with us ... like a runaway reactor! Gassho, J"

Jundo: It's time to be prudent and get the hell out of there. You have family to think of. There are nine nuclear reactors failing now. Some are venting steam into the air and water into the ground. Come back to the Bronx where things are safe.

Staring at boobs might or might not be good for you, but your offspring could inherit a greater tendency to do so...?

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody's eye.

Although the radiation currently reaching Tokyo and Tsukuba is, in the view of all experts I have heard, minor background increases ... not health threatening in any way ... I have been persuaded that I should not bring Leon back here now, not for a week or two. All information I have from good sources (one of the nice things of living in a science city like Tsukuba) is that a mild increase in radiation is harmless, and that is all we will likely experience here from the reactors. There is no need for panic (is there ever need for panic?)

However, the situation in the coming days needs to play out. So ... all things considered ... there is no reason to bring him back here if he need not be here. Much more than that, I am concerned about the unnecessary stress on a child of being here now, with the aftershocks several times per day and constant news bulletins. So, I would like him to be in a quiet place.

And since I cannot bring him back here ... and I do not wish to be away from my family for so many days ... I am going to be with my family and take a break from here for a bit.

As the highways are closed, I will be driving the back roads tonight to get to my family, now on the other side of Tokyo. I believe that the driving is by far the most dangerous part of thisl

One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions, okay? What are you going to land on – one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.

- - - - "We know that on this Earth of ours various phenomena occur which deeply affect the fate of many people; but present-day science looks on this as a purely external relationship. Thus the fate of hundreds and thousands may be affected by an earthquake or a volcano. Does the human will have any influence on this, or is it all a matter of chance? Are there dead laws which act with blind fury, or is there some connection between these events and the will of man? What is really happening when a man is killed by an earthquake? What does the occultist say about the interior of the Earth?" - - - -.